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The Nokia Lumia running Windows Phone (Photo credit: vernieman)

The latest numbers from Kantar Worldpanel (announced this week) should make for some good reading for the European arm of the Windows Phone team. The UK market share is up to 12% (up from 4.5% in August 2012), France reaches 10.8%, and overall in the top five EU countries the platform is on 9.2%. Windows Phone is on course to break the 10% barrier before the start of 2014.

The picture in the US is not so good. With 3.0% market share for August 2013, the share has grown just 15.4% over the last twelve months. Whatever is working in Europe is not translating to the different market conditions for smartphones in America.

Once more, the disparity between the European market share and the US market share is a fundamental issue for Microsoft. At 10%, Windows Phone can be regarded as a major player, but below 5% a company is counted as a niche player. It's very tricky to be both. If the US market share cannot be lifted by the time that Microsoft's purchase of the Devices and Services section of Nokia completes, then the Windows Phone team are going to be faced with two markets that will require different strategies and approaches.

It's a problem that Nokia never really cracked, and you have to assume that they weren't working on it in isolation. Of course many of those people will continue to work with the Lumia devices under the Microsoft banner. The current strategy has delivered a result in Europe, and I'm expecting the five biggest European markets to reach 10% before the end of the year.

But the US market is not taking off. You could make the argument that Microsoft should take a leaf out of Nokia's Symbian strategy and simply sacrifice the US market to focus on the European, Asian, and BRIC markets. I don't think Microsoft would want to withdraw from the home market, but they need to address the disparity to continue the growth in Europe one of the 'three majors', while working on the US market as a 'disruptor'.

The answer may like in Clayton Christensen's 'Innovators Dilemma'. If Microsoft treats the Nokia team who have delivered the double digits success as the incumbents and allows them to continue building the Windows Phone platform as a major player, then a smaller team working to their own remit at Redmond could be handed the task to focus on marketing and selling Windows Phone to America and act as a new disruptive force in the smartphone market.

Microsoft would still gain the benefits of building hardware and software under one roof. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the hardware of Windows Phone, and the on-board software is maturing nicely to meet user expectations. Third party software remains a concern, but the Windows Phone Store is in a far better position in terms of publishers and 'named brands' than BlackBerry World.

The issue is selling the handsets to the consumers, to the networks, to the developers, and to the corporate buyers. The previous approaches have not delivered the results in America. To take the same approach in 2014 would lead to the same disappointing result.